Dr. David Berson: Your Brain's Logic & Function

- Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

where we discuss science and science-based tools

for everyday life.

[upbeat music]

I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a Professor of Neurobiology

and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

Today my guest is Dr. David Berson,

Professor of Medical Science, Neurobiology and Ophthalmology

at Brown University.

Dr. Berson's laboratory is credited

with discovering the cells in the eye

that set your circadian rhythms.

These are the so-called intrinsically

photosensitive melanopsin cells.

And while that's a mouthful,

all you need to know for sake of this introduction is that,

those are the cells that inform your brain and body

about the time of day.

Dr. Berson's laboratory has also made

a number of other important discoveries

about how we convert our perceptions of the outside world

into motor action.

More personally, Dr. Berson has been my go-to resource

for all things neuroscience for nearly two decades.

I knew of his reputation as a spectacular researcher

for a long period of time.

And then many years ago, I cold called him out of the blue,

I basically corralled him into a long conversation

over the phone after which he invited me out to Brown

and we've been discussing neuroscience

and how the brain works and the emerging new technologies

and the emerging new concepts in neuroscience

for a very long time now.

You're going to realize today

why Dr. Berson is my go-to source.

He has an exceptionally clear and organized view

of how the nervous system works.

There are many many parts of the nervous system,

different nuclei and connections and circuits and chemicals

and so forth, but it takes a special kind of person

to be able to organize that information into a structured

and logical framework that can allow us to make sense

of how we function in terms of what we feel,

what we experience, how we move through the world.

Dr. Berson is truly one of a kind in his ability

to synthesize and organize and communicate that information.

And I give him credit as one of my mentors,

and one of the people that I respect most

in the field of science and medical science generally.

Today Dr. Berson takes us on a journey

from the periphery of the nervous system,

meaning from the outside,

deep into the nervous system layer by layer,

structure by structure, circuit by circuit

making clear to us

how each of these individual circuits work

and how they work together as a whole.

It's a really magnificent description

that you simply cannot get from any textbook,

from any popular book and frankly, as far as I know,

from any podcast that currently exists out there.

So it's a real gift to have this opportunity

to learn from Dr. Berson.

Again, I consider him my mentor in the field of learning

and teaching neuroscience,

and I'm excited for you to learn from him.

One thing is for certain, by the end of this podcast,

you will know far more about how your nervous system works

than the vast majority of people out there

including many expert biologists and neuroscientists.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast

is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

It is however part of my desire and effort

to bring zero-cost to consumer information about science,

and science-related tools to the general public.

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And now for my discussion with Dr. David Berson, welcome.

- Thank you. - Yeah.

- So nice to be here.

- Great to have you.

For more than 20 years you've been my go-to source

for all things, nervous system how it works,

how it's structured.

So today I want to ask you some questions about that.

I think people would gain a lot of insight into this machine

that makes them think and feel and see, et cetera.

If you would, could you tell us how we see?

A photon of light enters the eye, what happens?

- Right.

- How is it that I look outside, I see a truck drive by,

or I look on the wall I see a photo of my dog,

how does that work?

- Right, so this is an old question obviously.

And clearly in the end,

the reason you have a visual experience

is that your brain is got some pattern of activity

that associates with the input from the periphery.

But you can have a visual experience

with no input from the periphery as well.

When you're dreaming, you're seeing things

that aren't coming through your eyes.

- Are those memories?

- I would say in a sense

they may reflect your visual experience

they're not necessarily specific visual memories,

but of course they can be.

But the point is, that the experience of seeing

is actually a brain phenomenon.

But of course, under normal circumstances,

we see the world because we're looking at it

and we're using our eyes to look at it.

And fundamentally, when we're looking at the exterior world,

it's what the retina is telling the brain that matters.

So there are cells called ganglion cells,

these are neurons that are the key cells for communicating

between eye and brain, the eye is like the camera,

it's detecting the initial image,

doing some initial processing,

and then that signal gets sent back to the brain proper

and of course, it's there at the level of the cortex

that we have this conscious visual experience.

There are many other places in the brain

that get visual input as well doing other things

with that kind of information.

- So I get a lot of questions about color vision.

If you would, could you explain

how is it that we can perceive reds and greens and blues

and things of that sort.

- Right, so the first thing to understand about light,

is that it's just a form of electromagnetic radiation,

it's vibrating, it's oscillating, but.

- When you say it's vibrating, it's oscillating,

you mean that photons are actually moving?

- Well in a sense, photons they're certainly moving

through space, we think about photons as particles

and that's one way of thinking about light,

but we can also think of it as a wave like a radio wave,

either way is acceptable.

And the radio waves have frequencies

like the frequencies on the your radio dial,

and certain frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum

can be detected by neurons in the retina,

those are the things we see,

but there's still different wavelengths within the light

that can be seen by the eye.

And those different wavelengths are unpacked in a sense

or decoded by the nervous system

to lead to our experience of color.

Essentially, different wavelengths give us the sensation

of different colors through the auspices

of different neurons that are tuned

to different wavelengths of light.

- So when a photon, so when a little bit of light

hits my eye goes in,

the photoreceptors convert that into electrical signal?

- Right.

- How is it that a given photon of light

gives me the perception eventually,

leads the perception of red versus green versus blue?

- Right, so if you imagine that in the first layer

of the retina where this transformation occurs

from electromagnetic radiation into neural signals

that you have different kinds of sensitive cells

that are expressing, they're making different molecules

within themselves for this express purpose

of absorbing photons which is the first step

in the process of seeing, now it turns out that altogether,

there are about five proteins like this

that we need to think about in the typical retina,

but for seeing color really it's three of them.

So they're three different proteins,

each absorbs light with a different preferred frequency,

and then the nervous system keeps track of those signals

compares and contrasts them to extract some understanding

of the wavelength composition of light.

So you can see just by looking at a landscape,

or it must be late in the day

because things are looking golden

that's all a function of our absorbing the light

that's coming from the world

and interpreting that with our brain

because of the different composition of the light

that's reaching our eyes.

- Is it fair to assume that my perception of red

is the same as your perception of red?

- Well, that's a great question.

- And that mine is better?

I'm just kidding, I'm just kidding.

[laughs]

- It's a great question, it's a deep philosophical question.

It's a question that really probably can't even ultimately

be answered by the usual empirical scientific processes,

'cause it's really about an individual's experience.

What we can say is that the biological mechanisms

that we think are important for seeing color for example,

seem to be very highly similar

from one individual to the next whether it be human beings,

or other animals.

And so we think that the physiological process

looks very similar on the front end,

but once you're at the level of perception or understanding

or experience, that's something that's a little bit tougher

to nail down with the sorts of scientific approaches

that we approach biological vision let's say.

- You mentioned that there are five different cone types

essentially, the cones being the cells that absorb light

of different wavelengths.

I often wondered when I had my dog,

what he saw and how his vision differs from our vision.

And certainly, there are animals that can see things

that we can't see.

- Right?

- What are some of the more outrageous examples of that?

- I've seen things.

- And same things in the extreme.

- Right.

- Dogs I'm guessing see reds more as oranges, is that right?

'Cause they don't have the same array of of neurons

that we have for seeing color.

- Right, so the first thing is,

it's not really five types of colons,

there are really three types of colons.

And if you look at the way that color vision

is thought to work, you can sort of see

that it has to be three different signals.

There are a couple of other types of pigments.

One is really mostly for dim light vision.

When you're walking around in a moonless night

and you're seeing things with very low light

that's the rod cell that uses its own pigment.

And then there's another class of pigments

we'll probably talk about a little bit later,

this melanopsin pigment.

- I thought you were referring to like ultraviolet

and infrared and things like that.

- Right, so in the case of a typical,

well, let's put it this way.

In human beings, most of us have three cone types

and we can see colors that stem from that.

In most mammals including your dog or your cat,

there really are only two cone types

and that limits the kind of vision that they can have

in the domain of wavelength or color as you would say.

So really, a dog sees the world kind of like a particular

kind of color blind human might see the world,

because instead of having three channels to compare

and contrast they only have two channels

and that makes it much more difficult to figure out exactly

which wavelength you're looking at.

- Do colorblind people suffer much as a consequence

of being colorblind?

- Well, it's like so many other disabilities.

The world is built for people of the most common type.

So in some cases, the expectation can be there

that somebody can see something that they won't be able to

if they're missing one of their cone types let's say.

So in those moments, that can be a real problem.

If there's a lack of contrast to their visual system,

they will be blind to that.

In general, it's a fairly modest visual limitation

as things go.

For example, if not being able to see acutely

can be much more damaging,

not being able to read fine print for example.

- Yeah, I suppose if I had to give up

the ability to see certain colors

or give up the ability to see clearly,

I could certainly trade out color for clarity.

- Right, of course, color is very meaningful to us

as human beings, so we would hate to give it up.

But obviously, dogs and cats and all kinds of other mammals

do perfectly well in the world.

- Yeah, because we take care of them.

I spent most of my time taking care of that dog.

- He took care of me too.

Let's talk about that odd photopigment.

Photopigment of course being the thing that absorbs light

of a particular wavelength,

and let's talk about these specialized ganglion cells

that communicate certain types of information

from eye to the brain that are so important

for so many things.

What I'm referring to here of course is,

your co-discovery of the so-called

intrinsically photosensitive cells,

the neurons in the eye that do so many of the things

that don't actually have to do with perception,

but have to do with important biological functions.

What I would love for you to do

is explain to me why once I heard you say

we have a bit of fly eye in our eye.

- Yeah. - And you showed this slide

of a giant fly from a horror movie.

- Yeah. - Trying to attack this woman.

- Yeah.

- And maybe it was an eye also.

So what does it mean that we have a bit of a fly eye

in our eye?

- Yeah, so this last pigment is a really peculiar one.

One can think about it

as really the initial sensitive element in a system

that's designed to tell your brain

about how bright things are in your world.

And the thing that's really peculiar about this pigment,

is that it's in the wrong place in a sense.

When you think about the structure of the retina,

you think about a layer cake essentially.

You've got this thin membrane at the back of your eye,

but it's actually a stack of thin layers

and the outermost of those layers

is where these photoreceptors

you were talking about earlier are sitting.

That's where the film of your camera is essentially,

that's where the photons do their magic

with the photo pigments and turn it into a neural signal.

- I like that I've never really thought

of the photoreceptors is the film of the camera,

but that makes sense.

- Or like the sensitive chip on CCD chip in your cell phone.

It's the surface on which the light pattern is imaged

by the optics of the eye,

and now you've got an array of sensors

that's capturing that information

and creating a bitmap essentially,

but now it's in neural signals

distributed across the surface of the retina.

So all of that was known to be going on 150 years ago,

a couple of types of photoreceptors cones and rods.

If you look a little bit more closely,

three types of cones, that's where the transformation

from electromagnetic radiation to neural signals

was thought to take place.

But it turns out that this last photopigment

is in the other end of the retina,

the innermost part of the retina,

that's where the so-called ganglion cells are.

Those are the cells that talk to the brain,

the ones that actually can communicate directly

what information comes to them from the photoreceptors.

And here you've got a case where actually,

some of the output neurons

that we didn't think had any business

being directly sensitive to light

were actually making this photopigment, absorbing light,

and converting that to neural signals

and sending it to the brain.

So that made it pretty surprising and unexpected,

but there are many surprising things about these cells.

- So, and what is the relationship to the fly eye?

- Right, so the link there is,

that if you ask how the photopigment

now communicates downstream

from the initial absorption event

to get to the electrical signal,

that's a complex cellular process

involves many chemical steps.

And if you look at how photoreceptors in our eyes work,

you can see what that cascade is, how that chain works.

If you look in the eyes of flies or other insects

or other invertebrates,

there's a very similar kind of chain.

But the specifics of how the signals

get from the absorption event by the pigment

to the electrical response

that the nervous system can understand,

are characteristically different

between fuzzy furry creatures like us

and insects for example like the fly.

- I see.

- So these funny extra photoreceptors

that are in the wrong layer

doing something completely different

are actually using a chemical cascade

that looks much more like what you would see

in a fly photoreceptor,

than what you would see in a human photoreceptor,

a rod or a cone for example.

So it sounds like it's a very primitive aspect of biology

that we maintain.

- Exactly right, exactly.

- And despite the fact that dogs can't see as many colors

as we can and cats can't see as many colors as we can,

we have all this extravagant stuff for seeing color

and then you got this other pigment

sitting in the wrong not wrong,

but in a different part of the eye

sending processing light very differently.

- Right.

- And sending that information into the brain.

So, what do these cells do?

Presumably, they're there for a reason.

- They are, and the interesting thing is that,

one cell type like this carrying one kind of signal

which I would call a brightness signal essentially,

can do many things in the brain.

- When you say brightness signal you mean that,

like right now, I have these cells do I have these cells?

Of course. - You do.

- I'm joking, I hope I have these cells in my eye.

And they're paying attention to how bright it is overall,

but they're not paying attention

for instance to the edge of area

or what else is going on in the room.

- Right, so it's the difference

between knowing what the objects are on the table

and knowing whether it's bright enough

to be daylight right now.

So why does your nervous system need to know

whether it's daylight right now?

Well, one thing that needs to know

that is your circadian clock.

If you travel across time zones to Europe,

now your internal clock thinks it's California time,

but the rotation of the earth

is for different part of the planet.

The rising and setting of the sun

is not at all what your body is anticipating.

So you've got an internal representation

of the rotation of the earth in your own brain,

that's your circadian system it's keeping time.

But now you've played a trick on your nervous system,

you put yourself in a different place

where the sun is rising at the quote wrong time.

Well, that's not good for you, right?

So you got to get back on track.

One of the things this system does,

is sends a oh, it's daylight now signal to the brain,

which compares with its internal clock.

And if that's not right, it tweaks the clock gradually

until you get over your jet lag

and you feel back on track again.

- So the jet lag case makes a lot of sense to me,

but presumably, these elements didn't evolve for jet lag.

- Right.

- So, what are they doing on a day-to-day basis?

- Right, well one way to think about this is that,

the clock that you have in not just your brain,

in all the cells, almost all of the cells of your body,

they're all oscillating, they're all.

- They got local little clocks in them.

- They got local little clocks in themselves,

they're all clocks.

They need to be synchronized appropriately,

and the whole thing has to be built in biological machinery.

This is actually a beautiful story about how gene expression

can control gene expression, and if you set it up right,

you can set up a little thing that just sort of hums along

at a particular frequency.

In our case it's humming along at 24 hours,

'cause that's how our earth rotates

and it's all built into our biology.

So this is great, but the reality is,

that the clock can only be so good.

I mean, we're talking about biology here.

It's not precision engineering,

and so it can be a little bit off.

- Well, also it's in our brain,

so it doesn't have access to any regular unerring signal?

- Well, if in the absence of the rising

and setting of the sun it doesn't,

if you put someone in a cave,

their biological clock will keep time

to within a handful of minutes of 24 hours,

that's no problem for one day.

But if this went on without any correction,

eventually you'd be out of phase

and this is actually one of the things

that blind patients often complain about.

If they've got retinal blindness is insomnia.

[indistinct]

Exactly, they're not synchronized, their clock is there,

but they're drifting out of phase

because their clock's only good to 24.2 hours or 23.8 hours

little by little if they're drifting.

So you need a synchronization signal.

So even if you never across time zones

and of course we didn't back on the Savannah

we stayed within walking distance of where we were,

you still need a synchronizer, 'cause otherwise,

you have nothing to actually confirm

when the rising and the setting of the sun is,

that's what you're trying to synchronize yourself to.

- I'm fascinated by the circadian clock

and the fact that all the cells of our body

have essentially a 24-hour-ish clock in them.

- Right.

- We hear a lot about these circadian rhythms

and circadian clocks the fact that we need light input

from these special neurons in order to set the clock.

But I've never really heard it described

how the clock itself works

and how the clock signals to all the rest of the body

when the liver should be doing one thing

and the stomach should be doing another.

I know you've done some work on the clock.

So if you would just maybe briefly describe

where the clock is, what it does,

and some of the top contour of how it tells the cells

of the body what to do.

- Right, so the first thing to say is that, as you said,

the clock is all over the place.

Most of the tissues in your body have clocks.

- We probably have what, millions of clocks in our body.

- Yeah, I would say that's probably fair.

If you have millions of cell types,

you might have millions of clocks.

The role of the central pacemaker for the circadian system

is to coordinate all of these.

And there's a little nucleus,

a little collection of nerve cells in your brain

it's called the suprachiasmatic nucleus the SCN,

and it is sitting in a funny place

for the rest of the structures in the nervous system

that get direct retinal input.

It's sitting in the hypothalamus,

which you can think about as sort of the great coordinator

of drives and.

- The source of all our pleasures and all our problems.

- Right. - Or most our problems.

- Yes, it really is.

But it's sort of deep in your brain

things that drive you to do things.

If you're freezing cold, you put on a coat, you shiver,

all these things are coordinated by hypothalamus.

So this pathway that we're talking about from the retina

and from these peculiar cells

that are encoding light intensity,

are sending signals directly into a center

that's surrounded by all of these centers

that control autonomic nervous system

and your hormonal systems.

So this is a part of your visual system

that doesn't really reach the level of consciousness,

it's not something you think about,

it's happening under the radar kind of all the time

and the signal is working its way

into this central clock coordinating center.

Now what happens then is not that well understood,

but it's clear that this is a neural center

that has the same ability to communicate

with other parts of your brain as any other neural center.

And clearly, there are circuits that involve connections

between neurons that are conventional.

But in addition, it's quite clear

that there are also sort of humeral effects

that things are being oozing out of the cells in the center

and maybe into the circulation

or just diffusing through the brain to some extent

that can also affect neurons elsewhere.

But the hypothalamus uses everything

to control the rest of the body.

And that's true, the supracosmetic nucleus

this circadian center as well,

it can get its fingers into the autonomic nervous system,

the humeral system and of course, up to the centers

of the brain that organize coordinated rational behavior.

So if I understand correctly,

we have this group of cells, the suprachiasmatic nucleus,

it's got a 24-hour rhythm,

that rhythm is more or less matched

to what's going on in our external world

by the specialized set of neurons in our eye.

But then the master clock itself the SCN,

releases things in the blood humeral signals

that go out various places in the body.

And you said to the autonomic system

which is regulating more or less how alert or calm we are,

as well as our thinking and our cognition.

So I'd love to talk to you about the autonomic part,

presumably that's through melatonin,

it's through adrenaline how is it that this clock

is impacting how the autonomic system,

how alert or calm we feel?

- Right, so there are pathways

by which the suprachiasmatic nucleus can access

both the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system.

- Just so people know the sympathetic nervous system

is the one that tends to make us more alert,

and the parasympathetic nervous system

is the portion of the autonomic nervous system

makes us feel more calm.

- Right. - In broadcasting.

Right, to first approximation, right?

So, this is both of these systems

are within the grasp of the circadian system

through hypothalamic circuits.

One of the circuits that will be I think,

of particular interest to some of your listeners

is a pathway that involves this sympathetic branch

of the autonomic nervous system

the fight or flight system

that is actually through a very circuitous route

innervating the pineal gland

which is sitting in the middle of your brain.

- The so-called third eye.

- Right, so this is.

- We'll have to get back to why it's called the third eye,

because, yeah.

- That's an interesting thing.

- You can't call something the third eye and just.

- Just leave it there. - Just leave it there.

- Right. - Right.

- Anyway, this is the major source of melatonin

in your body.

- So light comes in to my eye.

- Yes.

- Passed off to the suprachiasmatic nucleus

essentially, not the light itself,

but the signal representing the light.

- Sure.

- Then the SCN, the suprachiasmatic nucleus

can impact the melatonin system.

- Right. - Via the pineal?

- Right, the way this is seen is that,

if you were to measure your melatonin level

over the course of the day,

if you could do this hour by hour,

you'd see that it's really low during the day,

very high at night.

But if you get up in the middle of the night

and go to the bathroom

and turn on the bright full fluorescent light,

your melatonin level is slammed to the floor.

Light is directly impacting your hormonal levels

through this mechanism that we just described.

So this is one of the routes

by which light can act on your hormonal status

through pathways that are completely beyond

what you normally would think about, right?

You're thinking about the things in the bathroom.

Oh, there's the toothbrush, there's the tube of toothpaste.

But meanwhile, this other system is just counting photons

and saying oh wow, there's a lot of photons right now

let's shut down the melatonin release.

- This is one of the main reasons why I've encouraged people

to avoid bright light exposure in the middle of the night.

Not just blue light, but bright light of any wavelength,

because there's this myth out there that blue light

because it's the optimal signal for activating this pathway

and shutting down melatonin,

is the only wavelength of light that can shut it down.

But am I correct in thinking that

if a light is bright enough.

- Right.

- It doesn't matter if it's blue light, green light,

purple light, even red light.

- Right.

- You're going to slam melatonin down to the ground

which is not a good thing to happen

in the middle of the night.

- Right. - Correct?

Right, yeah, any light will affect the system

to some extent, the blue light is somewhat more effective,

but don't fool yourself into thinking

that if you use red light

that means you're avoiding the effect,

it's certainly still there.

And certainly, if it's very bright,

it'll be more effective in driving the system

than dim blue light would be.

- Interesting, a lot of people wear blue blockers.

- Right.

- And in a kind of odd twist of misinformation out there,

a lot of people wear blue blockers

during the middle of the day,

which basically makes no sense

because during the middle of the day

is when you want to get a lot of bright light

and including blue light into your eyes, correct?

- Absolutely, and not just for the reasons

we've been talking about in terms of circadian effects,

there are major effects of light on mood.

And seasonal affective disorder apparently,

is essentially a reflection of this same system in reverse.

If you're living in the northern climes

and you're not getting that much light

during the middle of the winter in Stockholm,

you might be prone to depression

and phototherapy might be just the ticket for you

and that's because there's a direct effect of light on mood,

there's an example where if you don't have enough light

it's a problem.

So I think you're exactly right.

It's not about is like good or bad for you,

it's about what kind of light and when

that makes the difference.

Yeah, the general rule of thumb that I've been living by,

is to get as much bright light in my eyes

ideally from sunlight anytime I want to be alert.

- Right.

- And doing exactly the opposite when I want to be asleep.

- Yeah. - We're getting drowsy.

- And there are aspects of this that spin out

way beyond the conversation we're having now

to things like this.

It turns out that the incidence of myopia.

- Nearsightedness. - Nearsightedness, right.

Is strongly related to the amount of time

that kids spend outdoors.

- In what direction of effect?

- The more they spend time outdoors,

the less nearsightedness they have.

- So this is not because they're viewing things

at a distance,

or because they're getting a lot of blue light, sunlight?

- It's a great question, it is not fully resolved

what the epidemiological,

what the basis of that epidemiological finding is,

one possibility is the amount of light

which would make me think

about this melanopsin system again.

But it might very well be a question of accommodation

that is the process by which you focus on near or far things

if you're never outdoors, everything is nearby.

If you're outdoors, you're focusing far, so this is.

- Or unless you are on your phone?

- Right, exactly.

- There's a tremendous amount of interest these days

in watches and things that count steps.

I'm beginning to realize

that we should probably have a device that can count photons

during the day.

- Right.

- And can also count photons at night

and tell us hey, you're getting too many photons,

you're going to shut down your melatonin at night,

or you're not getting enough photons,

today you didn't get enough bright light,

whether or not it's from artificial light or from sunlight.

I guess that, where would you put?

I guess you put on the top of your head

or you'd probably want it someplace outward facing?

- Right, probably what you need is as many photons

over as much of the retina as possible

to recruit as much of the system as possible.

- In thinking about other effects

of this non-image forming pathway

that involves these special cells in the eye and the SCN,

you had a paper a few years ago

looking at retinal input to an area of the brain

which has a fancy name the peri-habenular,

but names don't necessarily matter

that had some important effects on mood

and other aspects of light.

Maybe you could tell us a little bit

about what is the peri-habenular?

- Oh, wow, so that's a fancy term,

but I think the way to think about this,

is a chunk of the brain

that is sitting as part of a bigger chunk

that's really the linker between peripheral sensory input

of all kinds, virtually all kinds,

whether it's auditory input or tactile input

or visual input to the region of your brain the cortex

that allows you to think about these things

and make plans around them and to integrate them

and that kind of thing.

So, we've known about a pathway

that gets from the retina through this sort of linker center

which it's called the thalamus, and then.

[indistinct]

Exactly, but you want to arrive at the destination.

Right now you're at grand central

and now you can do your thing

'cause you're up at the cortex.

So this is the standard pattern.

You have sensory input coming from the periphery,

you've got these peripheral elements

that are doing the initial stages of.

- The eye, the ear, the nose.

- Your skin of your fingertips, right?

The taste buds on your tongue

they're taking this raw information in

and they're doing some pre-processing

maybe or the early circuits are.

But eventually, most of these signals

have to pass through the gateway to the cortex

which is the thalamus.

And we've known for years, for decades, many decades,

what the major throughput pathway from the retina

to the cortex is and where it ends up.

It ends up in the visual cortex.

You pat the back of your head

that's where the receiving center is

for the main pathway from retina to cortex.

But wait a minute, there's more.

There's this little side pathway

that goes through a different part

of that linking thalamus center.

[indistinct]

- Like a local train.

- Yeah. - From grand central to.

- It's in a weird part of the neighborhood, right?

It's a completely different, it's like a little trunk line

that branches off and goes out into the hinterlands

and it's going to the part of this linker center

that's talking to a completely different part of cortex

way up front, frontal lobe,

which is much more involved in things like planning,

or self-image or.

- Self-image literally, how one.

- Views oneself, do you feel good about yourself,

or what's your plan for next Thursday.

It's a very high level center

in the highest level of your nervous system

and this is the region that is getting input

from this pathway which is mostly worked out in its function

by [indistinct] Tara's Lab.

I know you had him on the podcast.

- We didn't talk about this path.

- This pathway at all right.

So Dale Fernandez and [indistinct]

and the folks that work with them,

were able to show that this pathway doesn't just exist

and get you to a weird place.

But if you activate it at kind of the wrong time of day,

animals can become depressed.

And if you silence it under the right circumstances,

then weird lighting cycles that would normally make them act

sort of depressed, no longer have that effect.

- So it sounds to me like there's this pathway from eye

to this unusual train route through the structure

we call the thalamus,

then up to the front of the brain

that relates to things of self-perception,

kind of higher level functions.

I find that really interesting,

because most of what I think about

when I think about these fancy,

well, or these primitive rather,

neurons that don't pay attention to the shapes of things,

but instead to brightness I think of well,

it regulates melatonin and circadian clock,

mood, hunger, the really kind of vegetative stuff

if you will. - Right.

- And this is interesting because I think a lot of people

experience depression

not just people that live in Scandinavia

in the middle of winter, and we are very much divorced

from our normal interactions with light.

It also makes me realize

that these intrinsically photosensitive cells

that set the clock et cetera,

are involved in a lot of things.

They seem to regulate a dozen

or more different basic functions.

I want to ask you about a different aspect

of the visual system now,

which is the one that relates to our sense of balance.

So I love boats but I hate being on them.

I love the ocean from shore,

because I get incredibly seasick, it's awful.

I think I'm going to get seasick if I think about it too much.

[laughs]

And once I went on a boat trip,

I came back and I actually got motion sick or wasn't seasick

'cause I was rafting.

So there's a system that somehow gets messed up.

They always tell us if you're feeling sick

to look at the horizon et cetera, et cetera.

- Right. - So what is the link

between our visual system and our balance system

and why does it make us nauseous sometimes

when the world is moving in a way

that we're not accustomed to?

- Right.

- I realize this is a big question,

because it involves eye movement, et cetera.

- Right. - But let's maybe just walk in

at the simplest layers of vision, vestibular,

so-called balance system

and then maybe we can piece the system together for people

so that they can understand,

and then also we should give them some tools

for adjusting their nausea

when their vestibular system is out of whack.

- Cool, so the first thing to think about

is that the vestibular system is designed to allow you

to see how your or detect sense

how you're moving in the world, through the world.

It's a funny one because it's about your movement

in relationship to the world in a sense,

and yet it's sort of interoceptive

in the sense that it is really

in the end sensing the movement of your own body.

- Okay, so interoception

we should probably delineate for people

is when you're focusing on your internal state

as opposed to something outside you.

- Right.

- It's a gravity sensing system.

- Well, it's partly a gravity sensing system

in the sense that gravity is a force that's acting on you

as if you were moving through the world

in the opposite direction.

- All right, now you got to explain that.

You got to explain that to me.

- Okay, so basically the idea is that,

if we leave gravity inside, we're just sitting in a car,

in the passenger seat and the driver hits the accelerator

and you start moving forward, you sense that.

If your eyes were closed, you'd sense it.

If your ears were plugged in, your eyes would close,

you'd still know it.

- Yeah, many people take off on the plane like this

they're dreading the flight

and they know when the plane is taking off.

- Sure, that's your vestibular system talking,

because anything that jostles you out

of the current position you're in right now

will be detected by the vestibular system pretty much.

So this is a complicated system,

but it's basically in your inner ear

very close to where you're hearing.

- That they put it there.

And I don't know.

- And I don't really know, they're sort of derived.

[indistinct]

- Now I'm just kidding.

To steal our friend Russ Van Gelder's explanation,

we weren't consulted the design phase and no one.

- That's a great [indistinct].

- But it's interesting it's in the ear.

- Yeah. - Right?

- Yeah, it's deep in there

and it's served by the same nerve actually

that serves the hearing system.

One way to think about it is both the hearing system

and this vestibular self-motion sensing system

are really detecting the signal

in the same way they're hairy cells and they're exciting.

[indistinct]

- Yeah, sort of they got little cilia sticking up

off the surfaces.

And depending on which way you bend those,

the cells will either be inhibited or excited,

they're not even neurons but then they talk to neurons

with a neuron-like process and off you go.

Now you've got an auditory signal

if you're sensing things bouncing around in your cochlea

which is. - Sound waves.

- Sympathetically the bouncing of your eardrum

which is symmetrically the sound waves in the world.

But in the case of the vestibular apparatus,

evolution has built a system

that detects the motion of say fluid going by those hairs.

And if you put a sensor like that in a tube

that's fluid filled,

now you've got a sensor that will be activated

when you rotate that tube around the axis

that passes through the middle of it,

those we're just listening won't be able.

[indistinct]

- I was thinking of it as three hula hoops.

- Right, three hoops.

- One standing up, one lying down on the ground.

- Right.

- The other one the other way.

- Three directions, the people who fly

will talk about roll pitch and you all that kind of thing.

So three axes of encoding just like in the.

[indistinct]

- Sort of the yes, the no

and then I always say it's the puppy head tilt.

- Yeah, that puppy tilt.

- That's the other one.

So the point is that,

your brain is eventually going to be able to unpack

what these sensors are telling you

about how you just rotated your head

in very much the way that the three types of cones

we were talking about before

are reading the incoming photons

in the wavelength domain differently, and if.

- Red, green, blue.

- Yeah, you can compare and trust you get red, green, blue.

So same basic idea if you have three sensors

and you array them properly,

now you can tell if you're rotating your head left or right,

up or down that's the sensory signal

coming back into your brain

confirming that you've just made a movement that you will.

- But what about on the plane?

Because when I'm on the plane,

I'm completely stationary the plane's moving.

- Right.

- But my head hasn't moved. - Right.

- So I'm just moving forward, gravity is constant.

- Exactly.

- How do I know I'm accelerating?

- So what's happening now

is your brain is sensing the motion,

and the brain is smart enough also to ask itself,

did I will that movement or did that come from the outside?

So now in terms of sort of understanding

what the the vestibular signal means,

it's got to be embedded in the context

of what you tried to do,

or what your other sensory systems are telling you

about what's happening.

- I see, so it's very interesting.

But it's not conscious or at least if it's conscious,

it's very not conscious, it's definitely very fast, right?

The moment that plane starts moving,

I know that I didn't get up out of my chair and run forward.

- Right.

- But I'm not really thinking about

getting up out of my chair I just know.

- I guess the way i think about it is that,

the nervous system is quote, aware at many levels

when it gets all the way up to the cortex

and we're thinking about it,

you're talking about it, that's cortical.

But the lower levels of the brain

that don't require you to actually actively think about it

they're just doing their thing are also made aware, right?

A lot of this is happening under the surface

of what you're thinking, these are reflexes.

- Okay, so we've got this gravity sensing system?

- Right.

- I'm nodding for those that are listening

for a yes movement of the head,

a no movement of the head or the tilting of the head

from side to side. - Right.

- And then you said that knowledge about whether or not

activation of that system comes from my own movements,

or something acting upon me like the plane moving.

- Right.

- Has to be combined with other signals.

And so, how is the visual information

or information about the visual world

combined with balance information?

- Right, so yeah.

I guess maybe the best way to think about

how these two systems work together,

is to think about what happens when you suddenly

rotate your head to the left.

When you suddenly rotate your head to the left,

your eyes are actually rotating to the right.

Automatically, you do this in complete darkness.

If you had an infrared camera and watched yourself

in complete darkness, you can't see anything.

Rotating your head to the left,

your eyes would rotate to the right.

That's your vestibular system saying,

I'm going to try to compensate for the head rotation.

So my eyes are still looking in the same place.

Why is that useful, well, if it's always doing that,

then the image of the world on your retina

will be pretty stable most of the time

and that actually helps vision.

- Have they built this into cameras for image stabilization

'cause when I move, when I take a picture with my phone,

it's blurry, it's not clear?

- Well actually, you might want to get a better phone,

because now what they have is software in the better apps

that will do a kind of image stabilization post-hoc

by doing a registration of the images

that are bouncing around,

they say the edge of the house was here,

so let's get that aligned in each of your images.

So you may not be aware if you're using a good new phone

that if you walk around a landscape and hold your phone,

that there's all this image stabilization going on.

But it's built into standard cinematic technology now,

because if we tried to do a handheld camera,

things would be bouncing around,

things would be unwatchable,

you wouldn't be able to really understand

what's going on in the scene.

So the brain works really hard

to mostly stabilize the image of the world on your retina

and of course you're moving through the world

so you can't stabilize everything.

But the more you can stabilize most of the time,

the better you can see.

And that's why when we're scanning a scene

looking around at things,

we're making very rapid eye movements

for very short periods of time and then we just rest,

but we're not the only ones that do that.

If you ever watch a hummingbird,

it does exactly the same thing at a feeder, right?

[indistinct]

It is with its body.

It's going to make a quick movement,

and then it's going to be stable.

And when you watch a pigeon walking on the sidewalk,

it does this funny head bobbing thing.

But what it's really doing,

is racking its head back on its neck

while its body goes forward

so that the image of the visual world stays static.

- Is that why they're doing it?

- Yes, and you've seen the funny chicken videos

on YouTube, right?

- You take a chicken move it up and down

the head stays in one place, it's all the same thing.

All of these animals are trying hard

to keep the image of the world stable on their retina

as much of the time as they possibly can.

And then when they've got to move, make it fast,

make it quick and then stabilize again.

- That's why the pigeons have their head back?

- It is, yeah.

- Wow. - Yeah.

- I just need to pause there for a second

and digest that, amazing.

In case people aren't.

Well, there's no reason why people would know

what we're doing here, but essentially,

what we're doing is we're building up from sensory

light onto the eye, make color to what the brain does

with the integration of that circadian clock,

melatonin, et cetera.

And now what we're doing

is we're talking about multi-sensory or multimodal

combining one sense vision with another sense balance.

- Right.

- And it turns out that pigeons

know more about this than I do,

because pigeons know to keep their head back

as they walk forward. - Right.

- All right, so that gets us to this issue

of motion sickness. - Right.

- And you don't have to go out on a boat.

Anytime I go to New York, I sit in an Uber

or in a cab in the back.

And if I'm looking at my phone while the car is driving,

I feel nauseous by time I arrive at my destination.

- Right.

- I always try and look out the front of the windshield,

because I'm told that helps but it's a little tiny window.

- Right.

- And I end up feeling slightly less sick if I do that.

So what's going on with the vision and the balance system

that causes a kind of a nausea?

And actually, if I keep talking about this.

[indistinct]

[laughs]

I don't throw up easily, but for some reason motion sickness

is a real thing for me.

- It's a problem for a lot of people.

I think the fundamental problem typically,

when you get motion sick

is what they call visual vestibular conflict.

That is, you have two sensory systems

that are talking to your brain

about how you're moving through the world.

And as long as they agree you're fine.

So if you're driving,

your body senses that you're moving forward.

Your vestibular system is picking up

this acceleration of the car,

and your visual system is seeing the consequences

of forward motion in the sweeping of the scene past you.

Everything is honky-dory, right, no problem.

But when you are headed forward

but you're looking at your cell phone,

what is your retina seeing?

Your retina is seeing the stable image of the screen.

There's absolutely no motion in that.

- Or the motion is just or some other emotion like a movie.

- If you're playing a game or you're watching a video,

a football game, the motion is uncoupled

with what's actually happening to your body.

Your brain doesn't like that,

your brain likes everything to be aligned.

And if it's not, it's going to complain to you.

- By making me feel nauseous.

- By making you feel nauseous

and maybe you'll change your behavior.

So you're getting. - I'm getting punished.

- Yeah, for setting it up.

[indistinct]

- Right. - By the vestibular?

- You'll learn. - Visuals.

[laughs]

In time, I love it.

I love the idea of reward signals

and we've done a lot of discussion about this

on this podcast of things like dopamine reward and things,

but also punishment signals and I love this example.

Well, maybe marching a little bit further

along this pathway,

visual input is combined with balance input.

Where does that occur,

and maybe 'cause I have some hint of where it occurs.

You could tell us a little bit

about this kind of mysterious little mini-brain

that they call the cerebellum. - Cerebellum, yeah.

So the way I tried to describe the cerebellum to my students

is that, it serves sort of like

the air traffic control system functions in air travel.

So that it's a system that's very complicated

and it's really dependent on great information.

So it's taking in information

about everything that's happening everywhere

not only through your sensory systems,

but it's listening into all the little centers

elsewhere in your brain

that are computing what you're going to be doing next

and so forth.

So it's just ravenous for that kind of information.

- So it really is like a little mini-brain.

- It is, it's got access to all those signals.

and it really has an important role in coordinating

and shaping movements, but if you suddenly eliminated

the air traffic control system,

planes could still take off and land

but you might have some unhappy accidents in the process.

So the cerebellum is kind of like that.

It's not that you would be paralyzed

if your cerebellum was gone

because you still have motor neurons,

you still have ways to talk to your muscles,

you still have reflex centers,

and it's not like you would have any sensory laws

because you still have your cortex

getting all of those beautiful signals

that you can think about,

but you wouldn't be coordinating things so well anymore.

The timing between input and output might be off.

Or if you were trying to practice a new athletic move

like an overhead serve in tennis,

you'd be just terrible at learning.

All the sequences of muscle movements

and the feedback from your sensory apparatus

that would let you really hit that ball exactly

where you wanted to after the nth rep, right?

Now 1000th rep or something you get much better at it.

So the cerebellum is all involved

in things like motor learning and refining the precisions

of movement so that they get you where you want to go

if you reach for a glass of champagne

that you don't knock it over or stop short.

[indistinct]

- People who have selective damage to the cerebellum.

- Absolutely. - And I'm familiar with.

Well, Korsakoff's is different, right?

Isn't that a B vitamin deficiency in chronic alcoholics?

- Right. - And they tend to walk

kind of bow-legged and they can't coordinate their movements.

That has some that not memory bodies but also a cerebellum?

- I'm not sure about the cerebellar involvement there.

But the typical thing would be a patient

who has a cerebral or stroke or a tumor for example,

might be not that steady on their feet

if the dynamics of the situation you're standing

on a street car with no handle pull to hold on to,

they might not be as good at adjusting

all the little movements of the car.

There's a kind of tremor that can occur

as they're reaching for things,

because they reach a little too far

and then they over correct and come back, things like that.

So it's very common neurological phenomenon actually.

Cerebellar ataxia is what the neurologists call it,

and it can happen not just with cerebellar damage,

but damage to the tracts that feed the information

into the cerebellum.

- Right, it is the private structure.

- Exactly, or output from the cerebellum.

- And so, the cerebellum is where a lot of visual

and balance information is combined.

- In a very key place in the cerebellum,

which it's really one of the oldest parts.

- In terms of flocculus. - The flocculus, right.

It's a critical place in the cerebellum where visual

and vestibular information comes together

recording just the kinds of movements we were talking about.

This image stabilizing network it's all happening there.

And there's learning happening there as well.

So that if your vestibular apparatus

is a little bit damaged somehow,

your visual system is actually talking to your cerebellum

saying there's a problem here, there's an error,

and your cerebellum is learning to do better

by increasing the output of the vestibular system

to compensate for whatever that loss was.

So it's a little error correction system

that's sort of typical of a cerebellar function

and it can happen in many, many different domains.

This is just one of the domains of sensory motor integration

that takes place there.

- So I should stay off my phone in the Ubers.

if I'm on a boat, I should essentially look

and as much as possible act as if I'm driving the machine.

- Right. - That'd be weird

if I was in the passenger seat

pretending I was driving the machine.

But i do always feel better

if I'm sitting in the front seat passenger.

- Right, so more of the visual world that you can see

as if you were actually the one doing the motion

I would think.

- Let's stay in the inner ear for a minute

as we continue to march around the nervous system.

When you take off in the plane or when you land

or sometimes in the middle of there,

your ears get clogged or at least my ears get clogged,

that's because of pressure buildup in the various tubes

of the inner ear, et cetera, we'll get into this.

But years ago, our good friend Harvey Karten,

is a another world-class neuroanatomist

gave a lecture and talked about how plugging your nose

and blowing out versus plugging your nose and sucking in

should be done at different times

depending on whether or not you're taking off or landing.

And I always see people trying to unpop their ears.

- Right. - And when you do scuba diving

you learn how to do this without necessarily I can do it

by just kind of moving my jaw now

'cause I've done a little bit of diving.

But what's the story there?

We don't have to get into all the differences

in atmospheric pressure, et cetera,

but if I'm taking off and my ears are plugged,

I've recently ascended, plane take off, my ears are plugged,

do I plug my nose and blow out,

or do I plug my nose and suck in?

- Right, so the basic idea is that,

if your ears feel bad because you're going into an area

of higher pressure, so if they pressurize the cabin

more than the pressure that you have on the surface

of the planet, your eardrums will be bending in

and they don't like that.

If you push them more they'll hurt even more.

- It's a good description that the pressure goes up

then they're going to bend in.

- Bend in and then reverse would be true

if you go into an area of low pressure.

So if you knew you started to drive up the mountain side

the pressure's getting lower and lower outside,

now the air behind your eardrum is ballooning out.

- Yep. - Right?

So it's just a question

of are you trying to get more pressure or less pressure

behind the eardrum and there's a little tube that does that

and comes down into back your throat there.

And if you force pressure up that tube,

you're going to be putting more air pressure

into the compartment.

- To counter it.

- If it's not enough and if you're sucking

you're going the other way.

In reality, I think as long as you open the passageway,

I think the pressure differential

is going to solve your problem.

So I think you could actually blow in

when you're not supposed to.

- Okay, so you could just hold your nose and blow air out,

or hold your nose and suck in the.

- Right. - Effect either way is fine?

- I think so.

- Excellent, I just won $100 from Harvey Karten.

[laughs]

- Thank you very much, this is a lot.

Harvey and I used to teach neuroanatomy together

and I was like I don't think it matters,

but thank you very much, I'll split that with you.

- Okay.

[laughs]

- This is important stuff.

But it's true you hear this.

So it doesn't matter either way.

- I'm no expert in this area.

- Don't worry. - Don't quote me.

- He's not going to, well, I'm going to quote you.

But, okay, so we've talked about the inner ear,

we've talked about the cerebellum.

I want to talk about an area of the brain

that is rarely discussed which is the midbrain.

- Yeah.

- And for those that don't know,

the midbrain is an area beneath the cortex.

I guess we never really defined cortex

was kind of the outer layers or are the outer layers

of the at least mammalian brain or human brain.

But the midbrain is super interesting,

because it controls a lot of unconscious stuff,

reflexes, et cetera.

And then there's this phenomenon even called blind sight.

So could you please tell us about the midbrain

about what it does, and what in the world is sight?

- Yeah, so there's a lot of pieces there.

I think the first thing to say is,

if you imagine the nervous system in your mind's eye,

you see this big honking brain

and then there's this little wand

that dangles down into your vertical column the spinal cord

and that's kind of your visual impression.

What you have to imagine is starting in the spinal cord

and working your way up into this big magnificent brain

and what you would do as you enter the skull,

is get into a little place where the spinal cord

kind of thickens out.

It still has that sort of long, skinny trunk-like feeling.

- It's more like a paddle or a spoon shape.

- Right, it starts to spread out a little bit

and that's 'cause your evolutionists

packed more interesting goodies in there

for processing information and generating movement.

So beyond that is this tween brain we were talking about.

This linker brain with diencephalon really means

the between brain.

- Oh, I thought you said tween.

- Well, it is, yes. - No, no, no, between.

Between. - Between.

[indistinct] - You said tween.

- Yeah, it's the between, it's the between brain

is what the name means.

It's the linker from the spinal cord in the periphery

up to these grand centers of the cortex.

But this midbrain you're talking about is the last bit

of this enlarged sort of spinal cordy thing in your skull,

which is really the brain stem is what we call it.

The last bit of that before you get to this relay up

to the cortex is the midbrain.

And there's a really important visual center there,

it's called the superior colliculus.

There's a similar center in the brains

of other vertebrate animals a frog for example or a lizard,

would have this is called the optic tectum there

but it's a center, then in these non-mammalian vertebrates,

is really the main visual center.

They don't really have what we would call a visual cortex

although there's something sort of like that.

But this is where most of the action is

in terms of interpreting visual input

and organizing behavior around that.

You can sort of think about this region

of the brain stem as a reflex center

that can reorient the animal's gaze or body

or maybe even attention to particular regions of space

out there around the animal

and that could be for all kinds of reasons.

It might be a predator just showed up in one corner

of the forest and you pick that up

and you're trying to avoid it.

- Or just any movement. - Any movement, right?

It might be that suddenly something splats on the page

when you're reading a novel

and your eye reflexively looks at it.

You don't have to think about that, that's a reflex.

- What if you throw me a ball but I'm not expecting it?

- Right. - And I just reach up

try and grab it touch it or not.

Is that handled by the midbrain?

- Well, that's probably not the midbrain

although by itself, because it's going to involve

all these limb movements,

this movement of your arm and body.

- What about ducking

if something's suddenly thrown in your head?

- Sure, right, things like that

will certainly have a brainstem component,

a midbrain component, something looms and you duck.

It may not be the superior colliculus

we're talking about now,

it might be another part of the visual midbrain.

But these are centers that emerged early

in the evolution of brains like ours

to handle complicated visual events

that have significance for the animal

in terms of space, where is it in space?

And in fact, this same center

actually gets input from all kinds of other sensory systems

that take information from the external world

from particular locations

and where you might want to either avoid or approach things

according to their significance to you.

So you get input from the touch system,

you get input from the auditory system.

I work for a while in rattlesnakes,

they get input from a part of their warm sensors

on their face, they're in these little pits on the face.

- To work on baby rattlesnakes, right?

- They were adults.

- Oh, I wasn't trying to diminish the danger.

I thought for some reason they were little ones.

- No. - Why in the world

would you work on rattlesnakes?

- Well, because they have a version

of an extra receptive sensory system

that is they're looking out into the world

using a completely different set of sensors.

They're using the same sensors

that would feel the warmth on your face

if you stood in front of a bonfire.

Except, evolution has given them

this very nice specialized system

that lets them image where the heat's coming from.

You can sort of do that anyway, right?

If you walk around the fire,

you can feel where the fire is from the heat

hitting your face.

- Is that the primary way in which they detect prey?

- It's one of one of the major ways.

And in fact, they use vision as well

and they bring these two systems together

in the same place in this tectum regions

brain stem, midbrain.

- What's the tongue jutting about when the snakes?

- That I don't know.

That may be old factory, they're maybe.

- They're sniffing the air with their tongue?

- Yeah, there may be, 'cause.

- On our drive you told me that flies actually taste things

with their feet. - They do, yeah.

- That's so weird.

- Yeah, they have taste receptors and lots of funny places.

I want to pause here just for one second

before we get back into the midbrain.

I think what's so interesting in all seriousness

about taste receptors on feet, heat sensors,

tongues shutting out of snakes and vision

and all this integration is that,

it really speaks to the fact that all these sensory neurons

are trying to gather information and stuff it into a system

that can make meaningful decisions and actions.

And that it really doesn't matter whether or not

it's coming from eyes or ears or nose or bottoms of feet,

because in the end, it's just electricity flowing in.

And so it sounds like it's placed on each animal,

it always feels weird to call fly an animal.

But they are creatures, they are animals.

It's placed in different locations on different animals

depending on the particular needs of that animal.

- Right, but how much more powerful

if the nervous systems can also cross-correlate

across sensory systems?

So if you've got a weak signal from one sensory system,

you're not quite sure there's something there.

And a weak signal from an another sensory system

that's telling you the same locations

is a little bit interesting.

There might be something there

if you've got those two together you've got corroboration.

Your brain now says it's much more likely

that that's going to be something worth paying attention to.

- Right, so maybe I'm feeling some heat

on one side of my face

and I also smell something baking in the oven.

- Right. - So now there's,

it's neither is particularly strong, but as you said,

there's some corroboration.

- Right. And that corroboration

is occurring in the midbrain.

- Right, and then if you throw things into conflict,

now the brain is confused

and that may be where your emotion sickness comes from.

So it is great to have, as a brain,

it's great to have as many sources of information

as you can have, just like if you're a spy

or a journalist, you don't want as much information

as you can get about what's out there,

but if things conflict, that's problematic, right?

Your sources are giving you different information

about what's going on.

Now you've got a problem on your hands, what do you publish?

- The midbrain is so fascinating.

I don't want to eject us from the midbrain

and go back to the vestibular system,

but I do have a question that I forgot to ask

about the vestibular system which is,

why is it that for many people including me,

despite my motion sickness in cabs,

that there's a sense of pleasure

in moving through space and getting tilted relative

to the gravitational pull of the earth?

For me growing up it was skateboarding,

but people like to corner in cars, corner on bikes,

maybe for some people it's done running or dance.

But what is it about moving through space

and getting tilted a lot of surfers around here.

Getting tilted that can tap

into some of the pleasure centers.

Do we have any idea why that would feel like?

- I have no clue.

- Is there dopaminergic input to this system?

- Well, the dopaminergic system gets a lot of places.

It's pretty much to some extent everywhere in the cortex

a lot more in the frontal lobe of course,

but that's just for starters.

There's basically dopaminergic innervation most places

in the central nervous system.

So there's the potential for dopamine urging involvement

but I really have no clue about the tilting phenomenon.

- People pay money to go on roller coasters.

- Right, well, I think that may be as much about the thrill

as anything. - Sure.

And the falling reflex is very robust in all of us

when the visual world's going up very fast

it usually means that we're falling.

- Right. - But some people like that,

some people don't. - Right.

And kids tolerate a lot more sort of vestibular craziness

spinning around until they've dropped.

- And I've friends, it always you worries me a little bit

that they throw their kids.

I'm not recommending anyone do this.

When they're little like throwing the kids

really far back and forth, some kids seem to love it.

- Yeah, yeah, our son loved being shaken up and down

very vigorously, that's the only thing

that would calm him down sometimes.

- Interesting, yeah, so I'm guessing

we can guess that maybe there's some activation

of the reward systems from. - Yeah.

- Being moving through space.

- Well, if you think about how rewarding it is

to be able to move through space

and how unhappy people are who are used to that

who suddenly aren't able to do that,

there is a sense of agency, right?

If you can choose to move through the world and to tilt,

that's not only you're moving through the world,

but you're doing it with a certain amount of finesse,

maybe that's what it is.

You can feel like you're the master of your own movement

in a way that you wouldn't if you're going straight.

I'm just blowing smoke here, right?

- Yeah, well, we can speculate, that's fine.

I couldn't help but ask the question.

Okay, so if we move ourselves pun intended

back into the midbrain,

the midbrain is combining all these different signals

for reflexive action.

At what point does this become deliberate action?

Because if I look at something I want and I want to pursue it,

I'm going to go toward it

and many times that's a deliberate decision.

- Right, so this gets very slippery I think,

because what you have to try to imagine

is all these different parts of the brain

working on the problem of staying alive

and surviving in the world,

they're working on the problem simultaneously,

and there's not one right answer how to do that.

But one way to think about it is that,

you have high levels of your nervous system

that are very well designed to override

an otherwise automatic movement if it's inappropriate.

So if you imagine you've been invited to tea with the queen

and she hands you very fancy Wedgewood teacup very thin.

- Wedgewood teacup?

- Yes, with very hot tea in it and you're burning your hand,

you probably will try to find a way to put that back down

on the saucer rather than just dropping it on the floor

because you're with the queen.

You're trying to be appropriate to that.

So you have ways of reining in automatic behaviors

if they're going to be maladaptive.

But you also want the reflex to work quickly

if it's the only thing that's going to save you.

The looming object coming at your head,

you don't have time to think about that.

So this is the interplay

in these hierarchically organized centers

of the nervous system at the lowest level.

You've got the automatic sensors and centers

and reflex arcs that will keep you safe

even if you don't have time to think about it,

and then you've got the higher center saying,

well, maybe we could do this as well

or maybe we shouldn't do that at all, right?

So you have all these different levels

operating simultaneously

and you need bi-directional communication

between high-level, cognitive centers,

decision-making on the one hand,

and these low-level very helpful reflexive centers,

but they're a little bit rigid, a little hard-wired

so they need some nuance.

So they're both of these things are operating in tandem

in real time, all the time in our brains

and sometimes we listen more to one than the other.

You've heard people in sports talking about messing up

at the play 'cause they over thought it.

Thinking too hard about it.

That's partly you've already trained your cerebellum

how to hit a fastball right down the middle.

- Right, and if you start looking

for something new or different,

you're going to mess up your reflexive swing.

- Right, if you're trying to think

about the physics of the ball as it's coming at you,

you've already missed, right?

Because you're not using your, all those reps

have built a kind of knowledge is what you want to rely on

when you don't have enough time to contemplate.

- This is important and a great segue

for what I'd like to discuss next

which is the basal ganglia.

This really interesting of the area of the brain

that's involved in go-type commands

and behaviors instructing us to do things

and no-go preventing us from doing things.

Because so much of motor learning and skill execution

and not saying the wrong thing

or sitting still in class

or as you use with the tea with the queen example

feeling discomfort involves suppressing behavior

and sometimes it's activating behavior.

- Right.

- A tremendous amount of online attention

is devoted to trying to get people motivated.

This isn't the main focus of our podcast.

We touch on some of the underlying neural circuits

of motivation dopamine and so forth.

But so much of what people struggle with out there

are elements around failure to pay attention.

- Right.

- Or challenges in paying attention

which is essentially like putting the blinders on

and they're getting a soda straw view of the world

and maintaining that for a about of work

or something of that sort and trying to get into action.

So of course, this is carried out by many neural circuits

not just the basal ganglia.

But what are the basal ganglia,

and what are their primary roles in controlling

go type behavior and no-go type behavior?

- Yeah, so the basal ganglia are sitting deep

in what you would call the forebrains

or the highest levels of the brain.

They are sort of cousins to the cerebral cortex

which we talked about as sort of the highest level

of your brain, the thing you're thinking with.

- The cerebral cortex being the refined cousins

and then you've got the. - Right.

- The brute, yeah. - Yeah.

That's probably totally unfair, but.

- That's right, I like the basal ganglia.

I can relate to the brutish parts of the brain.

A little bit of hypothalamus,

a little bit of basal ganglia, sure.

- We need it all, we need it all.

And this area of the brain has gotten a lot bigger

as the cortex has gotten bigger

and it's deeply intertwined with cortical function.

The cortex can't really do what it needs to do

without the help of the basal ganglia and vice versa.

So they're really intertwined.

And in a way you can think about this logically is saying,

if you have the ability to withhold behavior

or to execute it, how do you decide which to do?

Well, the cortex is going to have to do that thinking for you.

You have to be looking at all the contingencies

of your situation to decide is this a crazy move,

or is this a really smart investment right now or what?

- I don't want to go out for a run in the morning,

but I'm going to make myself go out for a run,

or I'm having a great time out on a run

and I know I need to get back

but I kind of want to go another mile.

- I mean, another great example is that,

the marshmallow test for the little kids.

They can get two marshmallows if they hold off

just 30 seconds initially, they can have one right away.

But if they can wait 30 seconds, they got two.

So that's the no go because their cortex is saying,

I would really like to have two more than having one.

But they're not going to get the two

unless they can not reach for the one.

So they've got to hold off the action

and that has to result from a cognitive process.

So the cortex is involved in this in a major way.

- Yeah, as I recall in that experiment,

the kids used a variety of tools.

Some would distract themselves.

I particularly related to the kid

that would just put himself right next to the marshmallows

and then some of the kids covered their eyes,

some of them would count or sing.

Yeah, so that's all very cortical, right?

Coming up with a novel strategy,

simple example that we're using here.

But of course, this is at play anytime someone decides

they want to go watch a motivational speech

or something just a Steve Jobs commencement speech

just to get motivated to engage in their day.

- Should I take this new job?

It's got great benefits,

but it's in a lousy part of the country.

- Why do you think that some people have a harder time

running these go no-go circuits

and other people seem to have very low activation energy

we would say, they could just, they have a task,

they just lean into the task. - Right.

- Whereas some people getting into task completion

or things of that sort is very challenging for them?

- Yeah, I think it's really just another,

it's a special case of a very general phenomenon

which is brains are complicated.

And the brains we have are the result of genetics

and experience, and my genes are different from your genes

and my experiences are different from your experiences.

So the things that would be easy or hard for us

won't necessarily be aligned, they might just happen to be

just because they are, but the point is that,

you're dealt a certain set of cards,

you have certain set of genes, you are handed a brain,

you don't choose your brain it's handed to you.

Then there's all this stuff you can do with it.

You can learn to have new skills or to act differently

or to show more restraint which is kind of relevant

to what we're talking about here.

Or maybe show less restraint

if your problem is you're so buttoned down,

you never have any fun in life

and you should loosen up a little bit.

- Thank you, I appreciate that.

- Yeah. - Yeah.

[laughs]

David's always encouraging me

to have a little more fun in life.

[laughs]

So basil ganglia they're kind of the disciplinarian

or they're sort of the instructor conductor of sorts, right?

Go, no-go, you be quiet, you start now.

- I wish I knew more about the basal ganglia than I do.

My sense is that, this system is key

for implementing the plans that get cooked up in the cortex,

but they also influence the plans

that the cortex is dishing out

because this is a major source of information to the cortex.

So it becomes almost impossible to figure out

where the computation begins and where it ends

and who's doing what

because these things are all interacting

in a complex network, and it's all of it.

It's the whole network, it's not one is the leader

and the other is the follower.

- Right, of course, yeah, these are all the structures

that we're discussing are working in parallel.

- Right.

- And there's a lot of changing crosstalk.

I have this somewhat sick habit David.

Every day I try and do 21 no-gos.

So if I want to reach for my phone,

I try and not do it just to see if I can prevent myself

from engaging in that behavior, if it was reflexive,

if it's something I want to do a deliberate choice,

then I certainly allow myself to do it.

- Right.

- I don't tend to have too much trouble with motivation

with go type functions, mostly because I'm so busy

that I'd wish I had more time for more goes so to speak.

But do you think these circuits

have genuine plasticity in them?

- Absolutely, everybody knows how they've learned

over time to wait for the two marshmallows, right?

You don't have to have instant gratification all the time.

You're willing to do a job

sometimes it isn't your favorite job

because it comes with the territory

and you want the salary that comes at the end of the week

or the end of the month, right?

So we can defer gratification.

We can choose not to say the thing

that we know is going to inflame our partner

and create a meltdown for the next week.

We learn this control,

but I think these are skills like any other

you can get better at them if you practice them.

So I think you're choosing to do that to spontaneously,

is kind of a mental practice, it's a discipline,

it's a way of building a skill that you want to have.

- Yeah, I find it to be something

that when I engage in a no-go type situation,

then the next time and the next time

that I find myself about to move reflexively,

there's a little gap in consciousness

that I can make a decision whether or not

this is really the best use of my time.

Because sometimes I wonder whether or not all this business

around attention certainly there's the case of ADHD

and clinical diagnosed ADHD.

But all the issue around focus and attention

is really that people just have not really learned

how to short circuit a reflex.

And so much of what makes us different than rattlesnakes,

or well, actually they could be deliberate,

but from the other animals

and is our ability to suppress reflex.

- Yeah, well, that's the cortex.

Or let's say the forebrain.

Cortex and basal ganglia are working together

sitting on top of this lizard brain

that's giving you all these great adaptive reflexes

that help you survive.

You just hope you don't get the surprising case

where the thing that your reflex is telling you

is actually exactly the wrong thing

and you make a mistake, right?

[indistinct]

Right, so that's what the cortex is for.

It's adding nuance and context and experience,

past association and in human beings obviously,

learning from others through communication.

- Well, I was, you went right to it

and it was where I was going to go.

So let's talk about the cortex.

We've worked our way up the so-called neuraxis

as the aficionados will know, so we're in the cortex.

This is the seat of our higher consciousness,

self-image, planning and action.

But as you mentioned, the cortex isn't just about that,

it's got other regions that are involved in other things.

So maybe we should staying with vision,

let's talk a little bit about visual cortex.

You told me an amazing story about visual cortex

and it was somewhat of a sad story

unfortunately about someone who had a stroke

to visual cortex.

Maybe if you would share that story

because I think it illustrates many important principles

about what the cortex does.

- Right, so the visual cortex

you could say the projection screen.

The first place where this information streaming

from the retina through this thalamus connecting linker

gets played out for the highest level of your brain to see.

It's a representation,

it's a map of things going on in the visual world

that's in your brain.

And when we describe a scene to a friend,

we're using this chunk of our brain to be able to put words

which are coming from a different part of our cortex

to the objects and movements and colors that we see

in the world.

So that's a key part of your visual experience

when you can describe the things you're seeing,

you're looking at your visual cortex, and this is.

- Could I just ask a quick question?

So right now because I'm looking at your face.

- Right. - As we're talking,

there are neurons in my brain

more or less in the configuration of your face

that are active as you move about.

And what if I were to close my eyes and just imagine,

I do this all the time by the way David.

I close my eyes and i imagine David Berson's face.

[laughs]

I don't tend to do that as often, maybe I should.

But you get the point, I'm now using visualization

of what you look like by way of memory.

- Right. - If we were to image

the neurons in my brain, would the activity of neurons

resemble the activity of neurons that's present

when I open my eyes and look at your actual face?

- This is a deep question, we don't really have a full.

- It seems like.

[indistinct]

- Yes, except you're talking about looking in detail

at the activity of neurons in a human brain

and that's not as easy to do

as it would be in some kind of animal model.

But the bottom line is that,

you have a spatial representation of the visual world

late as a map of the visual world

lay down on the surface of your cortex.

The thing that's surprising is that,

it's not one map, it's actually dozens of maps.

- What do each of those maps do?

- Well, we don't really have a full accounting there either,

but it looks a little bit like the diversification

of the output neurons of the retina,

the ganglion cells we were talking about before.

There are different types of ganglion cells

that are encoding different kinds of information

about the visual world,

we talk about the ones that were encoding the brightness.

but other ones are encoding motion or color

these kinds of things, the same kinds of specializations

in different representations of the visual world

in the cortex seem to be true.

It's a complex story, we don't have the whole picture yet,

but it does look as if some parts of the brain

are much more important

for things like reaching for things in the space around you.

And other parts of the cortex are really important

for making associations between particular visual things

you're looking at now and their significance.

What is that object, what can it do for me,

how can I use it?

- What about the really specialized areas of cortex

like neurons that respond to particular faces,

or neurons that I don't know can help me understand

where I am relative to some other specific object?

- Right, so these are our properties of neurons

that are extracted from detected by recording the activity

of single neurons in some experimental system.

What's going on when you actually

perceive your grandmother's face,

is a much more complicated question

and it clearly involves hundreds and thousands

and probably millions of neurons

acting in a cooperative way.

So you can pick out any one little element

in this very complicated system

and see that it's responding differentially

to certain kinds of visual patterns

and you think you're seeing a glimpse

of some part of the process

by which you recognize your grandmother's face.

But that's a long way from a complete description

and it certainly isn't going to be at the level

of a magic single neuron that has the special stuff

to recognize your grandmother, it's going to be in some pattern

of activity across many, many cells

resonating in some kind of special way

that will represent the internal memory of your mother.

- So it's really incredible? - Yeah.

- I mean that every time we do this deep dive

which we do from time to time,

you and I we kind of like march into the nervous system

and explore how different aspects of our life experiences

is handled there and how it's organized.

After so many decades of doing this,

it still boggles my mind that the collection of neurons

one through seven active in a particular sequence

gives the memory of a particular face

and run backwards seven through to one,

it gives you a, it could be rattlesnake

pit viper heat sensing organs. - Right.

- You were talking about earlier.

So it sounds,

is it true that there's a lot of multi-purposing

of the circuitry, like we can't say

one area of the brain does A

and another area of the brain does B.

So areas can multitask or have multiple jobs.

They can moonlight.

- Right, but I think in my career,

the hard problem has been to square that

with the fact that things are specialized

that there are specific genes expressed

in specific neurons that make them make synaptic connections

with only certain other neurons.

And that particular synaptic arrangement

actually results in the processing of information

that's useful to the animal to survive, right?

So it's not as if it's either a big undifferentiated network

of cells and looking at any one

is never going to tell you anything

that's too extreme on the one hand,

nor is it the case that everything is hardwired

and every neuron has one function

and this all happens in one place in the brain,

it's way more complicated and interactive

and interconnected than that.

- So we're not hardwired or soft-wired?

- Both. - We're sort of,

I don't know what the analogy should be what substance

would work best David?

- No idea there, but the idea is that,

it's always network activity.

There's always many, many neurons involved

and yet there's tremendous specificity in the neurons

that might or might not be participating

in any distributed function like that, right?

So you have to get your mind

around the fact that it's both very specific

and very non-specific at the same time.

It's a little tricky to do,

but I think that's kind of where the truth lies.

- Yeah, and so this example

that you mentioned to me once before about a woman

who had a stroke in visual cortex,

I think it speaks to some of this.

- Right.

- Could you share with us that story?

- Sure, so the point is that, all those of us who see

have representations of the visual world

in our visual cortex.

What happens to somebody when they become blind

because of problems in the eye, the retina perhaps?

You have a big chunk of the cortex,

this really valuable [indistinct] for neural processing

that has come to expect input from the visual system

and there isn't any anymore.

So you might think about that as fallow land, right?

It's just used by the nervous system

and that would be a pity,

but it turns out that it is in fact used.

And the the case that you're talking about is of a woman

who was blind from very early in her life

and who had risen through the ranks

to a very high level executive secretarial position

in a major corporation.

And she was extremely good at braille reading

and she had a braille typewriter

and that's how everything was done.

And apparently, she had a stroke and was discovered at work,

collapsed and brought her to the hospital.

And apparently, the neurologist who saw her

when she finally came to said,

"I've got good news and bad news."

Bad news is you've had a stroke,

the good news is that it was in an area of your brain

you're not even using it's your visual cortex

and I know you're blind from birth

so there shouldn't be any issue here."

The problem was, she lost her ability to read braille.

So what appears to have been the case

and this has been confirmed in other ways

by imaging experiments in humans is that,

in people who are blind from very early in birth,

the visual cortex gets repurposed

as a center for processing tactile information.

And especially if you train to be a good braille reader,

you're actually reallocating somehow that real estate

to your fingertips.

A part of the cortex that should be listening to the eyes.

So that's an extreme level of plasticity.

But what it shows, is the visual cortex

is kind of a general purpose processing machine,

it's good at spatial information

and the skin of your fingers is just another spatial sense

and deprived of any other input the brain seems smart enough

if you want to put it that way to rewire itself

to use that real estate for something useful,

in this case, reading braille.

- Incredible, somewhat tragic, but incredible.

At least in that case tragic, yeah.

- Very informative. - Very informative.

And of course it can go the other way too.

- Right.

- Where people can gain function in particular modalities

like improved hearing or tactile function

in the absence of vision. - Right.

- Tell us about connectomes, we hear about genomes,

proteomes, microbiomes, ohms, ohms, ohms

these days. - Yeah.

- What's a connectome and why is it valuable?

- Yeah, so the connectome actually now has two meanings.

So I'll only refer to one that is my passion right now.

And that is really trying to understand the structure

of nervous tissue at a scale that's very, very fine.

- Smaller than a millimeter.

- Way smaller than a millimeter, a nanometer or less,

as that's 1,000 times smaller,

or it's actually a million times smaller.

So really, really tiny

on the scale of individual synapses

between individual neurons

or even smaller like the individual synaptic vesicles

containing little packets of neurotransmitter

they're going to get it released to allow one neuron

to communicate to the next.

So very, very fine, but the notion here is that,

you're doing this section after section at very fine scale.

So in theory what you have is a complete description

of a chunk of nervous tissue that is so complete

that if you took enough time to identify

where the boundaries of all the cells are,

you could come up with a complete description

of the synaptic wiring of that chunk of nervous tissue

because you have a complete description

of where all the cells are and where all the synapses

between where all the cells are.

So now you essentially have a wiring diagram

of this complicated piece of tissue.

So the omics part is the exhaustiveness of it

rather than looking at a couple of synapses

that are interesting to you from two different cell types.

You're looking at all the synapses of all of the cell types

which of course is this massive avalanche of data, right?

- So in genetics, you have genetics

and then you have genomics

which is the idea of getting the whole genome.

- All of it.

- And we don't really have an analogous word for genetics,

but it would be connectivity and [indistinct].

- Right. [indistinct]

- Right, so it's wanting it all

and of course it's crazy ambitious,

but that's where it gets fun.

Really it's a use of electron microscopy,

a very high resolution microscopic imaging system

on a new scale with way more payoff

in terms of understanding the connectivity

of the nervous system and it's just emerging,

but I really think it's going to revolutionize the field

because we're going to be able to query these circuits

how do they actually do it, look at the hardware

in a way that's never been possible before.

- The the way that I describe this to people

is if you were to take a chunk of kind of cooked

but cold spaghetti. - Right.

- And slice it up very thin you're trying to connect up

each image of each slice of the edge of the spaghetti

as figure out which ropes of spaghetti

belong to which.

- And have a complete description

of where this piece of spaghetti

touches that piece of spaghetti

is there's something special there obviously.

- Meat sauces and all the other cell types

and the pesto where it all is around the spaghetti

because those are the other cells, the blood vessels

and the glial cells.

And so, what's it good for?

Maps are great, I always think of connectomics and genomics

and proteomics, et cetera as necessary,

but not sufficient. - Right.

Right, so I mean in many cases what you do is you go out

and probe the function

and you understand how the brain does the function

by finding neurons that seem to be firing

in association with this function that you're observing.

And little by little you're work your way in

and now you want to know what the conductivity is

maybe the anatomy could help you.

But this connectomics approach

or at least the serial electron microscopy

reconstruction of neurons approach,

really is allowing us to frame questions

starting from the anatomy and saying,

I see a synaptic circuit here,

my prediction would be that these cell types would interact

in a particular way, is that right?

And then you can go and probe the physiology

and you might be right or you might be wrong.

But more often than not, it looks like the structure

is pointing us in the right direction.

So in my case, I'm using this to try to understand a circuit

that is involved in this image stabilization network

we're talking about, keeping things stable on the retina

and this thing will only respond

at certain speeds of motion.

These cells in the circuit

like slow motion they won't respond to fast motion,

how does that come about?

Well, I was able to probe the circuitry,

I knew what my cells looked like,

I could see which other cells were talking to it,

I could categorize all the cells

that might be the players here

that are involved in this mechanism of tuning the thing

for slow speeds,

and then we said it looks like it's that cell type

and we went and looked and the data bore that up.

But the anatomy drove the search

for the particular cell type

because we could see it connected in the right place

to the right cells.

So creates the hypothesis

that lets you go query the physiology,

but it can go the other way as well.

So it's always the synergy between these functional

and structural approaches it gives you the most lift.

But in many cases,

the anatomy has been a little bit the weak sister in this.

The structure trying to work out the diagram

because we haven't had the methods.

Now the methods exist

and this whole field is expanding very quickly,

because people want these circuit diagrams

for the particular part of the nervous system

that they're working on.

If you don't know the cell types and the connections,

how do you really understand how the machine works?

- Yeah, what I love about is,

we don't know what we don't know.

- Right.

- And scientists we don't ask questions, we pose hypotheses.

Hypotheses being of course some prediction

that you wager your time on basically.

- Right. - And it either turns out

to be true or not true, but if you don't know

that a particular cell type is there,

you could never in any configuration of life or a career

or exploration of a nervous system wager a hypothesis

because you didn't know it was there.

So this allows you to say ah,

there's a little interesting little connection

between this cell that I know is interesting

in another cell that's a little mysterious but interesting,

I'm going to hypothesize that it's doing blank,

blank and blank and go test that.

And in the absence of these connectomes,

you would never know that that cell was lurking there

in the shadows.

- Right, right, yeah.

And if you're just trying to understand

how information flows through this biological machine,

you want to know where things are.

Neurotransmitters are dumped out of the terminals

of one cell and they diffuse across the space

between the two cells which is kind of a liquidy space

and they hit some receptors on the postsynaptic cell

and they have some impact.

Sometimes that's not through a regular synapse,

sometimes it's through a neuromodulator

like you often talk about on your podcast

that are sort of.

- Dopamine. - Dopamine, exactly.

Oozing into the space between the cells

and it may be acting at some distance

far from where it was released, right?

But if you don't know where the release is happening

and where other things

are that might respond to that release

you're groping around in the dark.

- Well, I love that you are doing this

and I have to share with the listeners that,

the first time I ever met David

and every time I've ever met with him in-person

at least at his laboratory at Brown,

he was in his office, door closed,

drawing neurons and their connections.

[laughs]

And this is somewhat unusual

for somebody who's a endowed full professor or chairman

of the department et cetera for many years

to be doing the hands-on work.

Typically, that's the stuff that's done by technicians

or graduate students or postdocs.

But I think it's fair to say

that you really love looking at nervous systems

and drawing the accurate renditions

of how those nervous systems are organized

and thinking about how they work.

- Yeah, it's pure joy for me.

I mean, I'm a very visual person, my wife is an artist,

we look a lot of art together

just the forms of things are gorgeous in their own right.

But to know that the form is in a sense the function

that the architecture of the connectivity

is how the computation happens in the brain at some level

even though we don't fully understand that in most contexts,

gives me great joy 'cause I'm working on something

that's both visually beautiful but also deeply beautiful

in a sort of a higher sort of knowledge context,

what is it all about.

- I love it, well, as a final question,

I get asked very often about how people

should learn about neuroscience,

or how they should go about pursuing maybe an education

in neuroscience if they're at that stage of their life

or that's appropriate for their current trajectory.

Do you have any advice to young people, old people,

anything in between about how to learn

about the nervous system more maybe in a more formal way?

I mean obviously, we have our podcast,

there are other sources of neuroscience information

out there, but for the young person

who thinks they want to understand the brain,

they want to learn about the brain, what should we tell them?

- Well, that's a great question.

And there's so many sources out there.

It's almost a question

of how do you deal with this avalanche of information

out there, I think your podcast is a great way for people

to learn more about the nervous system in an accessible way.

But there's so much stuff out there

and it's not just that.

I mean, the resources are becoming more and more available

for average folks to participate in neuroscience research

on some level.

There's this famous Eyewire project of Sebastian.

- Oh yeah, maybe you let us about Eyewire.

- Yeah, so that's connectomics and that's a situation

where a very clever scientist realized

that the physical work of doing all this reconstruction

of neurons from these electron micro-graphs,

there's a lot of time involved.

Many, many person hours have to go into that

to come up with the map that you want

of where the cells are, and he was very clever

about setting up a context

in which he could crowdsource this

and people who were interested

in getting a little experience looking at nervous tissue

and participating in a research project

could learn how to do this and do a little bit.

- From their living room. - From their living room.

- We'll put a link to Eyewire, it also is a great bridge

between what we were just talking about connectomics

and actually participating in research.

- Right.

- And you don't need a graduate mentor

or anything like that. - Right.

So more of this is coming

and I'm actually interested in building more of this

so that people who are interested,

want to participate at some level

don't necessarily have the time or resources

to get involved in laboratory research

can get exposed to it and participate

and actually contribute, so I think that's one thing.

I mean, just asking questions of the people around you

who know a little bit more

and have them point you in the right direction.

Here's a book you might like to read,

there's lots of great popular books out there

that are accessible that will give you some more sense

of the full range of what's out there in the neurosciences.

- We can put some links to a few of those that we like.

- Right. - On basic neuroscience.

- Right. - Our good friend

Dick Masland, the late Richard,

people call him Dick Masland had a good book.

I forget the title at the moment.

It's sitting behind me somewhere over there on the shelf

about vision and how nervous systems work.

A pretty accessible book for the general public.

- Right - Yeah.

- Right, so that, and there's so many sources out there.

I mean, Wikipedia is a great way.

If you have a particular question about visual function,

I would say by all means, head to Wikipedians

and get the first look

and follow the the references from there,

or go to your library, or there's so many ways

to get into it, it's such an exciting field now.

There's so many,

I mean, any particular realm that's special to you,

your experience, your strengths, your passions,

there's a field of neuroscience devoted to that.

If you know somebody who's got a neurological problem

or a psychiatric problem, there's a branch of neuroscience

that is devoted to trying to understand that

and to solve these kinds of problems down the line.

So feel the buzz, it's an exciting time to get involved.

- Great, those are great resources that people can access

from anywhere zero-cost as you need an internet connection.

But aside from that, we'll put the links to some.

And I'm remembering, Dick's book is called,

"We Know It When We See It."

- Right, one of my heroes.

- Yeah, a wonderful colleague

who unfortunately we lost a few years ago.

But listen David, this has been wonderful.

- It's been a blast.

- We really appreciate you taking the time to do this

as people probably realize by now

you're an incredible wealth of knowledge

about the entire nervous system,

today we just hit this top contour

of a number of different areas

to give a flavor of the different ways

that the nervous system works and is organized

and how that's put together,

how these areas are talking to one another.

What I love about you

is that you're such an incredible educator

and I've taught so many students over the years.

But also for me personally as friends,

but also any time that I want to touch into the the beauty

of the nervous system, I rarely lose touch with it.

But anytime I want to touch into it

and start thinking about new problems

and ways that the nervous system is doing things

that I hadn't thought about, I call you.

So please forgive me for the calls past, present and future

unless you change your number.

And even if you do, I'll be calling.

- It's been such a blast Andy.

This has been a great session

and it's always fun talking to you.

It always gets my brain racing, so thank you.

- Thank you, thank you for joining me today

for my discussion with Dr. David Berson.

By now, you should have a much clearer understanding

of how the brain is organized and how it works

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